A squalid display of prejudice

Most of us celebrated the 12 days of Christmas as a time to exercise peace and love. At the Wren church of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, in London, they used the festival to demonstrate prejudice and hatred. The vicar and church council erected a replica of Israel’s security fence as part of their propaganda promotion called Bethlehem Unwrapped. The replica wall is so huge you can hardly see the church for it. It is lit up after sunset when a montage of images and anti-Israel slogans are projected on to it. There are, however, no counterbalancing images of the bombed-out Israeli buses, pubs, restaurants and nightclubs which occurred so frequently in Israel before the security barrier was installed.

St James’s Church does not do things by halves. It has long functioned as a gaudy, semi-pagan emporium for all the trappings New Age beliefs and to enter it is to wonder whether you are in a perfumed boudoir, an agitprop political headquarters or a joke shop. Bethlehem Unwrapped is an elaborate programme of the propaganda of hatred.

The perpetrators of a similar tableau, directed not against Jews but at Muslims, would instantly have been locked up for racism. Many of the usual suspects feature: noted anti-Israeli propagandists such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel and Nigel Kennedy, who supports a cultural boycott of Israel. At a Proms concert given by Palestinian musicians, Kennedy notoriously made a speech denouncing “apartheid” in Israel – comments so shameful that even the BBC cut them out. The narration at the wall show declares that the actual wall is “surrounding Bethlehem” – which is not true. Particularly sickening is the show’s reprise of the vigorously partisan documentary Jeremy Hardy versus the Israeli Army which bills itself as “Hardy’s campaign to free Palestine.”

The licentious display is a shameless presentation of a pack of lies, without any regard for recent history and context. The security fence was set up because the rising toll of Israeli civilians murdered by Palestinian suicide bombers became intolerable. But even this horror must be seen as part of the whole series of attacks on Israel since its refounding in 1948. Four times in the last 66 years, surrounding Arab nations have ganged up to invade Israel. Every war fought by the Israelis has been a defensive war, a struggle for survival. Another enemy – Iran – has frequently announced its intention to “wipe Israel off the map”. Every day, Israeli women and children face rocket attacks from Hamas terrorists in Gaza and Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

Israel’s response has been imaginatively political, as well as necessarily military. The Palestinians were offered the much-vaunted “two states solution,” notably in 1998 under the auspices of President Bill Clinton. Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, agreed to these proposals – only to return to the Middle East and declare a second intifada, a terrorist uprising against the Israeli people.

Despite the fact that, in the whole of the Middle East, Israel is the only state with a functioning democracy and a decent set of political freedoms, it is still regarded as a pariah by the British Foreign Office, the BBC The Guardian, The Independent, much of the rest of the media and, of course, the cosy hypocrites in the Church of England hierarchy and in the Synod. Bethlehem Unwrapped marked the descent of the Church of England into a public display of moral squalor.

This article first appeared in the Northern Echo.